A Cure for Suicide (18 page)

It rained all that day and into the next. When the rain passed away, I made another suggestion: that we take a short drive. There is an old mill we could go to, I saw it on the road, so I told her. I have never been there, she said, though I lived here for such a long time. We passed it often, and a feeling of mystery has long lain about it. The idea that we should go there, I love it, she told me. Let’s take some things with us and have a picnic. As she dressed, I began to tell her about an experience I had once had. Years ago, I said, when I first joined the civil corps, I traveled to many far places. In one of them, we were working to build a bridge that would connect two small towns. The idea was that these two small towns, each one on the opposite side of a river, would, when the bridge was built, become one single city. Although there had long been antagonism between the two towns—a history going back decades, perhaps even hundreds of years, of rancor, still it was believed the bridge would solve everything. We lived in tents along one side of the river. This was a relatively new part of the republic. There were still measures there in place that did not exist elsewhere, that no longer exist anywhere. One was prison. There was another worker, an older man, who shared my tent, along with three or four other older men. One day, he found that someone had been going through his things. He found that some old photographs of his had been taken, photographs of his wife and child. I did not understand why it was important then. It was beyond me, but he was enraged. There outside the tent, he confronted the other men, including one who he thought, he was sure of it, was the thief. We were using heavy steel cable to make the bridge, and there were pieces of it, cut pieces, lying around the camp. One was in his hand, and he struck the thief with it. To me it seemed an inconsequential blow. The cable was heavy, very heavy, and the blow was slow. I watched his arm travel through the air slowly. The thief did nothing to stop it. He seemed frozen. The cable went to the space where his head was, and moved the head out of the way, it moved the head to a place adjacent from the place where it had previously been. The one who had taken the photographs fell to the ground and was completely dead. He probably stopped breathing before his body reached the ground. So, I told Rana, as she dressed for our outing. She loved stories of this kind, and I could see by the way she drew her clothes on over herself that this was a good time. Where, for another audience, I might have stopped then, seeing that I had horrified them, for her I continued, so I told the interlocutor. I told her that, of course, the man was taken away. He was imprisoned in a place not ten miles away. There was a tribunal that decided on his fate, and he was put away. I worked on that bridge for another year, and every week or so, I would travel to the prison to visit him. It was a mid-size place, with a high electrified fence surrounding it. I would come, and there would be a group of other people waiting to visit. We’d all stand in line and, at some point, would go inside. While we stood in line, we would talk with each other. I remember the first time I went, I was standing with a woman my own age, whose husband was incarcerated. She asked me whom I was visiting, and I told her that it was a friend of mine, a man I had often played cards with. I got carried away, and began to speak romantically about his fate. I was there on the line, a young man myself in a place far from where I had grown up, full of my own life, and in describing the condition and affairs of my friend to this young woman, I went overboard. I said that he was unfairly sentenced, that he had had his reasons for doing what he had done, and that they were good reasons. I spoke very rationally and explained all about why he didn’t deserve to be in the prison, in a way that admitted no doubt in my mind that we were all of us, she and I, and the others in line, a part of an injustice. I imagined that her husband was wrongfully inside, or I came to imagine it in the course of my speech. Although at the beginning of my foolish little speech, I knew that my friend was guilty, and that this woman, that her husband was probably guilty, too, by the end, I had been carried away. I had tried with my speech to establish camaraderie with her on the basis of this injustice. She would have none of it. She turned away, actually refused to look at me, and said, my husband is in prison for raping a woman who lived in the apartment below us. He has no right to have visitors, but still I come, I don’t know why. I stood there in the line, actually trembling. Now, I told the interlocutor, when I said this to Rana, she was not at all horrified, as everyone else had been. Each person to whom I had told this story had been moved to distaste, had looked at me in a sad new light. That I should have such a story and feel compelled to say it out loud, it was horrible. If it were true, then it was awful. If it were an invention, it was almost worse. Which was worse, the invention or the truth—actually, it was hard to say. That was the usual reception of my story. But, Rana, just brightened up. She had finished dressing. She was settling a light jacket over her shoulders. She said to me, I would love to go and see that bridge. Can we?

And we set out driving for the mill, and in the distance ahead of us, we could see the storm receding. We are pursuing it, I said. Then she reminded me of the storm map that she had bought me, and we fell to speaking of my room in the boardinghouse again. Have you, I asked the interlocutor, has anyone ever done something for you so completely beyond all possibility of repayment that you just stand there agog, helpless in their presence? That is how it was for me. When I brought her to my room, there in the shabby boardinghouse, a place where half the windows were boarded up—rooms in which people still lived were boarded up, a boardinghouse because people stayed there, but also, because it was falling apart, it was held together by shabby boards—I brought her there, showed her my room and its absence of things, and she in all her good grace was pleased, delighted, fell even more in love with me, and went off. That it should have happened that way was amazing, but what happened next was this. I went to work at the antiques store where I had a position, and when I came back at night, expecting the same—some pieces of cheap paper, a pallet, a chair, what I found was this: I had given her a gift, I had presented my life to her as numerous notes on paper, taped in the absence of things, as shadows of a sort, in order that she could see whom it was that she had met, when she had met me. For a long time, I had hidden my things, my gathered physical life from her, but finally I had gone to present it to her, and I had failed, I had waited too long, my things were gone; yet, I had created this simulacrum, and given that to her in its place. Knowing her capacity, I knew that she could take my descriptions and hold them all gently up together at once, and that she could feel what the room had been like, and judge me. I wanted that judgment and so I had given that gift to her. Then, she had come back in the days following, she had come back, and, she must have had some help. I don’t know how she did it, how she could have performed such an action, but, using my meticulous descriptions, she searched through the city for each and every one of the belongings named and described on my sheets of paper. Using the descriptions, she matched each to an object as like to it as possible. She brought these objects together, and set them down, each and every one, in the place I had said they should be, and recompleted the room that had been stolen. Somehow, she had stolen into the room, bypassing the lock, and she had replaced every one of my things. A framed photograph of a lunch counter, endlessly continuing its perspective off into the bottom right, a hundred stools or more, punctuated again and again and again by a neatly dressed sodajerk with a white hat. A small painting of a rat, in the Chinese style. An old fountain pen, half size, with a notebook into the binding of which the pen fit, and in the binding of which there was a small pot of ink actually bottled and held fast. A large Spanish folding knife, tied in a cloth and hanging from a nail. A pair of glasses of extremely heavy prescription, useful as a magnifying glass. An empty birdcage, with a bone flute propped in it. A small crank phonograph, nonfunctioning, and two cracked records. A suit of clothes, finely embroidered, for a child, hung on the wall. A map of the Maginot Line. A canvas bag on a peg full of broken ivory piano keys. A Venetian rooster mask. An old-fashioned bullhorn, hung by the window, half painted red, half painted green, with the number 71 in white emblazoned on the green side. I had worked in an antiques store for a long time, and had built up a small collection, a fine but small collection. Somehow she had scoured our city, and perhaps sent out to others, who could say, and had found something like to every thing I had once owned. To these she added one item: on the table, she left all the slips of paper in a tall glass jar, and on the jar she put a note:
love, let us replace every imagined thing with a real thing.
She did not even need to be there to see my happiness. She was at her parents’ home. I went immediately there, and she disclaimed it. She smiled to herself and said, someone else must have done it. Do you have another lover?

The mill was largely broken down. We stopped by the road and crossed a field of thistle and weed to reach it. As I did, I paused at the threshold, but she plunged in. From room to collapsed room, she went, eager, possessed with the power of the adventure. I went after, looking for her in bedraggled and shattered chambers. Though in many places, an old mill like this would have become the site of drinking, of vandalism, it was here so far from anywhere that it was only what it had been—a mill that someone had walked away from, or died in, that time had settled upon with all its weight. The glass in the windows was old, and thicker at the bottom. The mill wheel had fallen off, and part of it could be seen slumped down into the water. We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise, I thought. Immediately, I heard her laughter through a space in the walls, and I felt—lightness. What a fool I was to think such sentiments. Here I was in a derelict mill and I had humanized the structure in the most paltry way. My mind was so limited, I thought. Where I, standing in the mill, felt only grief at my own impending death, a death that was half a century off, so distant it could not even be conceived, she, on the other hand, felt buoyed. Standing in the mill, she felt the delight that a world could be, and that in it, a mill could be, and that in order they should fall this way—world, mill, and then her standing in a mill, with myself a room distant. I went to where I thought she had been, and it seemed I was mistaken. She was not there but on the roof, actually overhead. She had been watching me. I climbed up with her, and we sat on the mill, and wherever we went within it, it broke more, and we left it worse than when we had come. I said that to her, and she said, it has had some friends, now, though, or at the very least acquaintances. Without us, it would simply have sat this evening watching the road. Then she laughed again, it is almost a koan,
what is the use of an old broken grist mill.
We were quiet for a while. I could see she had suddenly been overwhelmed. She was dizzy, and sat all the way to the ground, so I told the interlocutor. I should say she fell, but it was slower than that. Are you all right? We should go back, now, she told me. Suddenly, I can hardly stand. It is night already. A moment ago, it was plain day, and now, night. It isn’t as dark as that, I said. Come on. We went back across the field, and though she had skipped to the mill in and out of the high grasses, she now labored as though under a yoke. I lifted her into the car and got in beside her. She regained some strength there, spread out in the car where we had had so many fine times. I once thought, she told me, that I would be a diver. My aunt went on a world travel at age sixteen, my mother’s sister, and in Mexico, she leapt from a cliff and died. She was in a group with others—nine other sixteen-year-olds, all from my mother’s town. They all jumped; the guide jumped. It was deemed safe. Every one of them survived but her. She was found in the water with her neck broken. I was young when my father told me this story, so Rana said. I had been looking at old pictures, and I found one of her, there, actually on the cliff, in a bathing suit. The photograph was taken moments before. It was found in the camera of one of the other children. It seemed to me from the picture that she would be a wondrous diver. The other children were gangly or squat, ill proportioned. She was a sort of swan, just perfect—the sweep of her at sixteen was marvelous. I felt, seeing this picture, that she possessed the utterness of this word,
diver.
Yet, my father said to me, so Rana told me, that in jumping off that cliff, she had ended her life. I wanted to be a diver, too. I told him that. I stood there, a child, looking at a picture of my father’s sister-in-law, his own cousin, who had died, the sadness of which he had borne for decades, and in the moment of his relating to me the tragedy of her death, I said, I want to be a diver, too. That is how I was as a child. I want you to know that, Rana told me, so I said to the interlocutor. She sat there, stunningly beautiful, in this beat-up old car. We were parked there in the mountains, where a mill had been built by a river, where the river had mostly gone dry and the mill had broken down completely. This place where people had lived had become completely overgrown. She and I, this wonderful girl, Rana, and I, had adventured there, and taxed her, taxed her to her utmost, and now she, terribly, vengefully beautiful, sat with her knees to her chest in the car, telling me of her childhood idols, and her childhood impudence. I think, I told her, that you would have made a spectacular diver.

I woke up on the sixth day. The night before, we had talked of whether we would go back soon, whether we would make the travel. I had asked her about it, and she had had little to say—only, as you like. I am not ready yet, she might have said. When I am a little stronger, or something like it. I had misgivings, I think. I believe, I told the interlocutor, that as I fell asleep, I had misgivings about staying there any longer. I had suddenly come to believe that she was not affected by the altitude at all, that she, as a mountain-person, would never have been affected by it. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I told him, my thoughts led me to believe that she was not affected by the altitude, but was instead very sick, that she had been all along—the whole time I’d known her, and that I somehow hadn’t seen it. But, it is easy to think that now—to believe I had thought that, when, in fact, it is quite possible that I didn’t think it at all, but rather, as we so often are,
I was on the edge of thinking it,
and never came wholly into the thought. However it was, however it might have been, I woke that morning in a bed overlooking the stream as it fell through a sort of gorge, the bed that she had chosen for us to sleep in, and I turned over and tugged at her. I spoke to her. This terrible and inconceivable thing had suddenly come to be completely and unutterably true: I found upon waking, that she had died in the night, at some point in the night, and I had kept on sleeping, knowing nothing.